The Telescreens

In 1984 the telescreens seem to be a big part of everyones lives. They are informed, monitored, and even entertained by these screens. Every morning the Party members are jerked out of their sleep by the screeching of the telescreen. Once they are awake they have to do excercises and are monitored by the instructor. This to me seems very strange and creepy. It is an invasion of privacy, especially knowing that they could be watching and listening to you all the time. There are some forms of entertainment on the telescreens. There are movies and music that the people surprisingly enjoy. The movies, as we discussed before, are crule, disturbing, and very different from what we are used to. To me the music just seems like something they use to fill in the gaps when they have nothing else playing. It is always military music, so maybe this is just another way of the Party trying to brainwash the people. There are also long messages of news and updates. They are mainly just statistics that are almost always false. I think they do this to make it seem like the Party is advancing. They compare current statistics with statistics from the past, which are also false. Winston knows in his mind that these facts are untrue, but there is no way to prove it. One thing I noticed was that the proles are not required to have a telescreen. This just shows how much the Party really doesn't care about the Proles or what they do. From class, I learned that this word comes from the word proletariat. When I looked it up, I learned that it means the class of industrial workers. They are also the lowest social class who don't have the skills to work with "normal" people, so they sell their labor for money. Throughout the book it showed that no one really cares about the proles, or their actions. If Proles don't have a telescreen, the Party can't monitor what they do. This is why Winston believes that all hope lies in the Proles. They can do whatever they want without being seen and there are so many of them. So you can see, the telescreen is very important to the Party's controllers to ensure that everything goes the way they want it to.